Widows of Pearl Harbor survivors remember infamous day

PANAMA CITY — Rebecca Christenbury doesn’t recall declining two marriage proposals, but her mother used to tell her that she did.

CHRIS OLWELL | The News Herald

PANAMA CITY — Rebecca Christenbury doesn’t recall declining two marriage proposals, but her mother used to tell her that she did.

Christenbury’s aunt never married; Christenbury’s mother was especially concerned the same fate would befall her daughter, who was only 21 when mom told her that the sailor in Honolulu who wanted to marry her had asked twice already. Reject him a third time, mother warned, and he might get tired of asking.

It occurs to Christenbury 72 years later that her mom might have fabricated the first two proposals, but back then a woman who was unmarried at 21 was running a serious risk of becoming an old maid, so Christenbury went to Hawaii. She arrived Nov. 12, and she was married three days later.

When she was 16, she’d been reading in a car while she waited on a friend to run an errand before they were to attend a Wednesday night church service. He walked by the car once. Then a second time. And a third. He was interested even then, she would later find out.

“He told me later — much later,” Christenbury said during a recent visit to relatives in Panama City for the holidays. Allen Christenbury thought “Mmmm, but I’ll have to see her ankles first.”

On Dec. 7, 1941, three weeks after they married, the honeymoon was over for Rebecca and Allen Christenbury.

The upstairs neighbor woke them up and told them to turn on the radio because they wouldn’t believe what was happening.

The Empire of Japan launched a sneak attack without a formal declaration of war that arrived in two waves.

More than 350 planes attacked and delivered a terrible blow to the U.S. Navy. The attack sank four battleships and destroyed nearly 200 planes. About 2,400 Americans were killed.

The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan, declaring that Dec. 7, 1941 was a date that would “live in infamy.” America had entered the deadliest war in history.

Those were dark days, said Doris Chrastina of Panama City. She remembered hearing FDR’s speech on the radio in her high school study hall. Her future husband, William Chrastina, was in the Navy stationed at Pearl Harbor.

Doris Chrastina remembers how united and determined Americans were during that time. That generation was grappling with the lasting effects of the Great Depression.

“I don’t think we have the unity today like we did then,” Chrastina said. “We were determined to keep our freedom.”

Chrastina and a generation of women left the home and entered the workplace. Chrastina was a riveter.

“Our country is not what it used to be back then,” she said. “I think people were just kind of tough back then.”

Her husband, who died in 2006, would later describe his actions that day and the days that followed — removing American corpses from the water — but that was much later. Even after the war when he was stationed again at Pearl Harbor.

“He didn’t talk about it for so long,” she said.

Allen Christenbury didn’t talk about it either, not until a few years before he died.

He had a couple of close calls that morning on his way from his home to his duty station. He would later describe watching Japanese planes that seemed to target him specifically fall from the sky after they were shot down.

A Japanese plane strafed the shuttle boat he was on between shore and his ship, the USS Whitney. The plane was so close Allen Christenbury swore he looked into the pilot’s eyes. Then he watched a Marine shoot that plane down.

Rebecca Christenbury would not be an old maid, but as she hunkered down for the night with the other women in her neighborhood she had no idea whether or not she would become a 21-year-old widow. She didn’t learn for more than two weeks that her husband had survived the attack.

The couple reunited only a handful of times before Allen shipped out for the Pacific Theater a few months later, and she didn’t see him again for several years.

After working as a telephone operator for about a year on the island, Rebecca Christenbury returned to North Carolina, where she still lives. She reunited with her husband after the war, and they raised three children, who gave them six grandchildren.

The Christenburys returned to Pearl Harbor for the 50th anniversary of the attack. Rebecca remembers what a local shopkeeper told them when they stepped inside the shop to avoid the rare rain shower that seemed to start and stop with the parade.

“The lady came up to me, and she said, ‘this is the island welcoming you. This is the island saying thank you for saving our island,’ ” Rebecca Christenbury said.

They were married 67 years before Allen died about five years ago when he was 90.

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